'I do not so much write a book as sit up with it, as with a dying friend. During visiting hours, I enter its room with dread and sympathy for its many disorders. I hold its hand, and hope it will get better.
This tender relationship can change in a twinkling. If you skip a visit or two, a work in progress can turn on you.
A work in progress quickly becomes feral. It reverts to a wild state overnight. It is barely domesticated, a musing on which you one day fastened a halter, but which you now cannot catch. It is a lion you cage in your study. As the work grows, it gets harder to control; it is a lion growing in strength. You can visit it every day and reassert you mastery over it. If you skip a day, you are, quite rightly, afraid to open the door to its room. You enter its room with bravura, holding a chair at the thing and shouting, "Simba!"'
Annie Dillard, The Writing Life, p.52.
